food museum blog

The Bard's Bday, and Blight

First of all, to honor the birthday of the Bard, whomever he may be, a little foodish real estate advice from Falstaff (Henry IV, Part I) : "...you may buy land now as cheap as stinking mackerel."

And now, today's serious depressing news portion--not war, no, but pestilence.  African and Asian wheat crops are being laid low by blight.

According to The Guardian, "Scientists say millions of people face starvation following an outbreak of a deadly new strain of crop disease ...Experts believe the disease - Puccinia graminis ( or Ug99)- will spread to Egypt, Turkey, the Middle East and finally India and Pakistan, which would lead to the destruction of the principal source of food for more than a billion people. Some observers warn that the disease could reach Egypt, which is heavily dependent on wheat, before the end of this year.

'This thing has immense potential for social and human destruction,' the international agriculture expert and Nobel prize-winner Norman Borlaug warned this month.

Black stem rust has blighted wheat production in many parts of the world for thousands of years. So pernicious were its effects that the Romans prayed to a stem rust god called Robigus."

We have spent time with the amazingly energetic Norman Borlaug, 93 year-old father of the Green Revolution, and the man who created the World Food Prize. He undoubtedly sees the irony in one aspect of this blight situation. As reported in a more thorough exploration of the subject in the New Scientist, "  ...Ug99 will find agriculture has changed to its liking in the decades stem rust has been away. "Forty years ago most wheat wasn't irrigated and heavily fertilised," says Borlaug. Now, thanks to the Green Revolution he helped bring about, it is. That means modern wheat fields are a damper, denser thicket of stems, where dew can linger till noon - just right for fungus."

(As hideous as this situation is, I could not help but zero in on the Roman god thing. Apparently the Robigalia was  celebrated on April 25, rapidly upcoming. And Robigus was often celebrated along with Flora, goddess of blossoms, in a kind of horticultural/agricultural Ying Yang event.)

In memoriam: R.W. Apple, Jr.

R.W. Apple, Jr. has died. Though lauded for his political writing and editing over a long career at the New York Times, Mr. Apple's appreciative food writing, barely mentioned in today's obit, will long remain with me.

The blog Take Back the Times  featured this a year ago:  "Apple is not one of these restaurant critics who sneaks into the restaurant, wearing a false beard and no one knows who he is. No, his arrival is often set up well in advance, and he goes, as he did at Uglesich's, for a special meal where the proprietor has put on all his best efforts.

Apple does not appear at lousy restaurants. He only goes to the best, and the NYT sends him and his wife, Betsy, who is usually present, all over the world at its expense. It falls into the category of a public service of the first water."

On a trip to Shanghai  that Apple wrote up  for the NYT in October 2005, he reported that after a morning sampling goodies from food stalls, "...I felt fat as a Strasbourg goose, but my eating buddies insisted that we stop at a 24-hour noodle shop on Shandong Zhonglu, behind the Westin, to watch a particularly deft cook do his stuff. "No need to eat," said Mr. Leung, a Hong Kong-born Chinese. "Just watch." Sure. We watched, all right, as a huge ball of dough was kneaded and rolled and tossed and hacked into ragged little squares that reminded Mr. Vongerichten, an Alsatian, of spaetzle, and twisted and stretched and flipped and folded into long, supple noodles. But of course I had to sample a bowl of beef noodle soup, lightly curry-flavored, before we left, and of course that spoiled my lunch."

This detail of Apple's packing was in today's NYT obit: "To the end of his life, Mr. Apple kept a small black bag packed with essentials, including a personal pepper mill, ready to be whisked away on a moment’s notice for a big story, or for a little one that caught his fancy."

(Ah, this touches my heart---  my mother, too, never traveled without her black pepper, along with coffee-making gear and decent wattage light bulbs.)

Another favorite of mine, Calvin Trillin, profiled Apple in The New Yorker in 2003.

( Top: Gerald Scarfe's Falstaffian caricature of Mr. Apple.)

A Nourishing Journal

If you like your foodie literature short and sweet, neatly contained in a journal suitable for insertion in pockets,  and you'd rather not wait for the New Yorker's special issue on food, Alimentum is for you. The New York-based journal was launched by writer and caterer Paulette Licitra soon after she had the notion that food had not yet been honored by a dedicated lit mag. Her husband, Peter Selgin, a writer, painter, editor, teacher, shares editing duties with Paulette, the publisher. Evidently they are already backlogged on submissions--the first two editions, Winter and Summer, have just emerged--so expect a wait on your poem about the armadillo that refused to cook up tender. Ultimately Alimentum hopes to pay its writers but for the moment the reward is seeing your work in elegant print.

On Sunday Foodie caught the Alimentum crowd at a reading at a restaurant in Brooklyn to note the publication of Summer. (Night and Day in Park Slope hosted the event.) While some material "reads" well and its authors have a gift for same, other does not, alas. We think that the best presenters should take the mike---Foodie assumed, incorrectly, that she would find the authors in the magazine, after the fact. Alas, she does not know the name of the fellow who did a funny riff on the food references missing from Lawrence's Women in Love, nor the young woman who read some poetry with memorable lines like, "the fish in the window are taken already," and "Keep the taste of your sandwich closed, in your mouth," and something about the bottoms of feet, as "flaky as whitefish." Lynn Levin read with delayed amusement about her attempt to eat guinea pig in Peru, and Angus Woodward wondered what the "tomato as a fruit or not" controversy was all about.

Foodie was about to launch into a didactic explanation of the whole affair settled by the Supremes in 1887---the government wanted tomatoes taxed as a veg, the importers wanted it untaxed as a fruit--and of course we all know technically that it is a fruit, botanically...but since this entire explanation would have been utterly unliterary, Foodie shut up and ate her nicely prepared fried baby artichokes.

If Music be the Food of Love, Play On

The fanciful folks over at soupsong.com have a superlative page devoted to the Bard, and we think we should pass it along to all those who find poetry in food or food in poetry or even poultry in motion, but that's another blog post.

Here's an example:

Henry IV, part 1, III, 1:
HOTSPUR:     O, he is as tedious         As a tired horse, a railing wife;         Worse than a smoky house: I had rather live         With cheese and garlic in a windmill, far,         Than feed on cates and have him talk to me         In any summer-house in Christendom.

"Cates," by the way, are delicacies.

Illustration from Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC

Pablo Neruda's "Ode to an Onion" on the centenary of his birth

Here's Pablo Neruda's "Ode To The Onion." Neruda, Chilean writer and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature was born a century ago this month.

Onion,
luminous flask,
your beauty formed
petal by petal,
crystal scales expanded you
and in the secrecy of the dark earth
your belly grew round with dew.
Under the earth
the miracle
happened
and when your clumsy
green stem appeared,
and your leaves were born
like swords
in the garden,
the earth heaped up her power
showing your naked transparency,
and as the remote sea
in lifting the breasts of Aphrodite
duplicating the magnolia,
so did the earth
make you,
onion
clear as a planet
and destined
to shine,
constant constellation,
round rose of water,
upon
the table
of the poor.

You make us cry without hurting us.
I have praised everything that exists,
but to me, onion, you are
more beautiful than a bird
of dazzling feathers,
heavenly globe, platinum goblet,
unmoving dance
of the snowy anemone

and the fragrance of the earth lives
in your crystalline nature.

What are your favorite food poems?